alt Hacker NewsI am mostly an autodidact and learned bits regex on the fly when I needed it and I was always baffled why people have auch a hard time with it.
The problem IMO is that a lot of the traditional teaching material starts with the complexity (and impressive possibilities) of regex, when the best way to start learning it is probably just thinking about it as an extension to simple text matching.
Getting to know regex fully is in fact complicated, getting know enough regex to filter/search/replace 90% of everything you will always need is not too complicated.
Autodidact here. Beyond just the five core quantifiers
regex only has capture groups and lazy variants of the core quantifiers "?", "*" and "+", which are helpfully called: The rest is just shorthands.So while I think it's a worthwhile suggestion not to show people the whole thing the first time round, I doubt that the whole thing is really that complicated.